About
I fell in love with the guitar when I was 8 years old after watching Michael J Fox play Johnny B Goode in Back to the Future. However, from an earlier age I had always enjoyed making and inventing things. This artistic creativity took centre stage in my life growing up. That was up until I started learning the electric guitar when I was 14 years old. At that point my music and art competed against each other for my time.
At school I would paint guitars in Art, play them at lunchtime and build one in Design and Tech. The first guitar I built was a huge 2 ¼” one-piece mahogany bodied instrument. It was heavy! So over the next year I made many modifications to it, including carving the top on one side, and making the other side semi-hollow much like Brian May’s Red Special. The sustain was amazing, and the weight became manageable.
During college, the dilemma of which path to follow – music or art – became ever pressing. Neither a career as a guitarist nor an artist was exactly a stable future, so I opted to pursue my creativity in the apparently safer option of Digital Animation. After spending every day and night glued to a computer screen for 3 years I decided it wasn’t for me – I needed to make something real…
While it seemed that I had gotten off-track, the degree did teach me a great deal about texturing and reflectivity which I now apply in all of my guitar concepts.
I spent a number of years as an in-house Illustrator and Editor, but always playing and modifying guitars in the background; building up experience and knowledge. I now feel that I have finally unified my love of art and music into one and can’t imagine doing anything else. Guitars offer so much potential for creative expression and adaption and its my goal to fulfill that.